One-Off Works and Gallery Performances

Would You Do That For Me?, February 2015

Espace Cercle Carré, Montreal, QC, as part of the LEGS performance relay event

How do we negotiate actions with an audience, within performance art contexts? Do we assume that because we ask a viewer to engage that the engagement will ensue – or in the manner that we (pre)suppose it will? “Will You Do That For Me?” took these questions as points of departure into a short action that, while being done “for an audience” required an active negotiation and empathetic listening in order that the actions be completed.

Sharpshooter (top five hits: 3.33 RPH version), February 2014

Hub 14, Toronto, ON, as part of the Link & Pin series

Following up from the first Sharpshooter performance, top five hits: lesson #2 was pushed to a further limit, becoming a three-hour durational performance. “This is an invitation to listen to Nothing really slowly building and when the cycle ends it starts again and Nothing really happens – except we share the space with the soundtrack of my life in song. And then Nothing might turn into Something. But I don’t want to jinx it. (5 x 3 minute pop x 3.33 x per hour x 3 hours).”

Sharpshooter (top five hits: lesson #1, lesson#2), October 2013

Bain Saint-Michel, Montreal, QC, as part of VIVA! Art Action festival

By special invitation from La Centrale, Galerie Powerhouse, I presented Sharpshooter (top five hits: lesson #1, lesson #2). Done in two parts, this piece was an attempt to publicly embody that which I had experienced and (very slowly) integrated from my time in residence in Mexico (as manifested through lesson #1) and that which I have been researching and exploring in my performance practice in general over the last nearly twenty years (as manifested through lesson #2): being alone, being together, holding space collectively in a prolonged space of interval.

two and a half weeks (what is left to sea), March 2013

Open Arts, Saint John, NB, as part of the event Equinox

In the context of my residence in Saint John, NB with Third Space Gallery, I was invited to present a performance for the Equinox event at Open Arts, a former church converted into an art centre and school. At the half-way point of my time in Saint John, this became an opportunity to collect and sift through my research findings, once again considering how the invisible and the interval (in particular to spaces that we don’t know and are slowly discovering) can be made manifest in a symobolic, yet embodied and physicalized way.

Nostalgia Embotellada: lo que puedo y no puedo llevarme a casa / Bottling Nostalgia: what I can and can’t take home, December 2012

La Casa Azul, Real del Monte, Mexico, as part of the residence SimbiosisSymbiosis2012

An attempt to synthesize the extremely rich and complex experience of having spent two months in Mexico, Bottling Nostalgia was a visual poem, a love song to Real del Monte that started out slowly and subtly with a 2-hour walking performance (tracing the routes (some arduous) that were taken on a daily basis to get to and from the studio), eventually gathering around the empty fountain outside our studio to fill it up with the objects (food, water bottles and flower petals) that populated this intensive visit and that ultimately, I would have to leave behind.

Practicing Dialogues, January 2010

Galerie Corrid’Art Compagnie F, Montreal, QC, as part of opening for solo exhibition

In the context of the opening of my solo exhibition, (Being) One Thing at a Time at Galerie Corrid’Art in Montreal, the Collectif TouVA (myself, along with Anne Bérubé and Sylvie Tourangeau), presented a short performance about passages and transformation.

Her Shit is My Gold, September 2009

Bain Saint-Michel, Montreal, QC, as part of VIVA! Art Action festival

In the context of the fabulous BBB Johannas Deimling workshop given during the VIVA! Art Action festival in Montreal, I presented a performance in which, as the title suggests, Her Shit became My Gold. Her is a composite of several negative tape-loops and poisonous past characters that no longer needed to inhabit this adult body. Her became no longer necessary and finally was expelled in a glorious waterfall of golden sparkles.

Supreme Leg Elixir, September 2008

Marché au puces, Place de la Joliette, Marseille, France as part the festival Préavis de désordre urbain

One of a series of performances done during the annual Préavis, this offering put invited artists to the test: the festival created duos at random, asking us to swiftly come up with a new performance. In collaboration with Czech artist Jiri Suruvka, we made Supreme Leg Elixir! Using the notion of recycling as a starting point, we brewed a fine new beverage from scraps of fruits and vegetables and in a public market, auctioned off our wares.

Flea Market (Stuff I), September 2008

Marché au puces, Place de la République, Sète, France, as part of the festival Infr’Action

Working with fellow Montreal artist Sylvie Cotton, we presented a table of random, personal objects that we drew and re-drew – not offering our objects for sale but interpreting these quotidian, seemingly banal pieces for the market-goers to also reflection upon. Very quickly we accumulated a mass of drawings: simple sketches that highly personalized our boring old objects – imbuing each of them with another layer of importance and significance. One person’s junk is another person’s treasure. Or, in this case, my junk is important because it’s mine and I treasure it.

Untitled (parking tickets), August 2003

Parc Alphonse-Télesphore-Lépine in Montreal, QC, as part of a Galerie B-312 performance evening

Attached my five scale-model SUVs by string to my neck, wrists and ankles. The ones I will never ever own, the ones that I am slowly in the process of exploiting and dest
roying. Issued infraction tickets to the park-goers and showed, by example, that your stuff really drags you down.

Storefront, May 2003

One of a trilogy of performances that I undertook during this festival, this storefront tableau vivant presented the humans as naked apes. Each of us sat with a mini SUV as our individual table serving. A large highway-like chocolate cake rested in the middle of the table, set upon poplar tree branches. We destroyed the branches (going off-roading on the table) and dealt with the highway-cake. This performance was done with the additional participation of Paul Couillard, T.L. Cowan, Chelley Nighttraveller, and Stephan Little.

Evidence III (Some French Fries With That Mr. President?), April 2003

Gallery Para Globe, Tokyo, Japan, as part of the four-person exhibition Invisible Others

Putting forth rows and rows of french fries standing upright in their signature red boxes, this neat and tight formation confronted the audience. The audience members – armed with cutlery distributed from my cutlery dress – were ordered to drop their weapons, effectively making them defenceless in the face of the MacDonald’s army. Then the attack.

Untitled (Captain Snooze), April 2003

Captain Snooze, Melbourne, Australia

What happens when five people go shopping for one bed? A direct lead-up to the performance series (Being) One Thing at a Time, this site-specific intervention bluntly attempted to disrupt quotidian behaviours and expectations within a place of business.

Untitled (PFK vs. Buffalo), October 2002

Site-specific intervention at the corner of Sherbrooke and Decarie, Montreal, QC

Commenting through direct action on the ubiquitous and blantantly sexist Jeans Buffalo ad residing permanently at this Montreal street corner. Is “acceptable behaviour” in advertising considered acceptable in real life?

Untitled (corner of four fountains), June 2002

Site-specific intervention at the Corner of Four Fountains in Rome, Italy

An attempt to re-activate the four emptied fountains residing at that site and to become – if only for a brief moment – a human fountain. This performance, which explored the body as water/as related to architecture, was done in collaboration with Sylvie Cotton.

Today I Ate, April 2002

Galerie 303, Montreal, QC, presented at the vernissage for the photo/artist-book-based solo exhibition of the same name

A gallery-space tableau vivant examining consumerism, desire, control and restraint – and in particular, women’s relationships to these issues. Four women, naked, sat for one-and-a-half hours, wrists (and other various body parts) bound with measuring tapes, holding pocket-size diet books, eating (or attempting to eat) rice cakes from a two-foot rice cake tower placed at the feet. With the participation of Marta Cooper, Louise Dubreuil, and Christine Lebel.

Operation Cake Walk, October 2001

A post-September 11th store-front tableau vivant addressing issues of control, consumerism and privilege. In a starkly lit environment, six nude caucasian people played The Game of Risk. “Moves” were made by eating forkfuls of a large piece of chocolate cake placed at each person’s table-setting. A whole, un-touched cake sat pristinely in the centre of the table – hence in the middle of the game and on top of the world. With the participation of Sylvette Babin, Stephen Cacclin, Paul Couillard, Louise Dubreuil and Tagny Duff.

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